He had also forgotten how exhausting meetings were.
By Friday afternoon, he missed Harlow with physical intensity.
He missed the garage smell.
He missed customers who described failures as "makes a sound when I turn left" instead of producing fifty-page requirement documents.
He missed the radio.
Mostly, he missed work that ended with an object either running or not running.
Before he left Houston, Eleanor handed him a revised team charter.
"Your language made it in."
He found the section.
Independent dissent reviewers would be drawn from outside the direct program reporting chain for specified safety-critical objections. Any adverse personnel action involving an engineer with an open technical dissent required separate review to ensure the action was not being used to suppress the issue.
Isaac read it twice.
"This won't stop bad managers."
"No."
"It won't stop frightened engineers."
"No."
"It creates paperwork."
"A lot of it."
He looked up.
"I approve."
"High praise."
On the drive back to Harlow, he stopped at a roadside diner two hours outside Houston and found himself thinking about his father.
Russell Merritt had not been an engineer by credential.
He had been a diesel mechanic, welder, fabricator, and the kind of person neighbors called when a machine had failed in a field after dark. He could look at a broken bracket and decide which piece of scrap in his yard had already lived one life and was ready for another.
Isaac had once been embarrassed by the garage.
At seventeen, after winning a state science competition, he brought two classmates home. One looked around at the oil stains and bent metal stacked by the rear fence and asked whether Isaac's father ran a junkyard.
Isaac had laughed with him.
He remembered the laugh more clearly than the trophy.
That evening Russell said nothing about it.
Two weeks later, while they were rebuilding an irrigation pump, he handed Isaac a cracked housing and asked whether it could be saved.
Isaac, still learning, said no.
Russell welded a temporary fixture, machined a sleeve by hand, and returned the pump to service for another five years.
"You know the difference between junk and a machine?" Russell asked.
Isaac shrugged.
"Somebody's patience."
Years later, after Isaac earned degrees, patents, and titles his father could barely pronounce, Russell still called him when an engine sounded wrong.
Not because Russell needed technical superiority.
Because he liked sharing problems.
Isaac had not fully understood that until his father was gone.
Now, sitting alone in a roadside diner with a NASA badge in his pocket and grease still under one thumbnail, he realized the garage had not been where he hid after aerospace rejected him.
It had been where he learned the part of engineering that aerospace had failed to teach him.
Prestige was not the same as value.
Complexity was not the same as difficulty.
And a machine did not care where the person fixing it had been educated, fired, praised, or forgotten.
The next morning, Noah was waiting outside Merritt Repair before Isaac arrived.
"You're late."
Isaac checked his watch.
"It's six forty-five."
"You're usually here at six thirty."
"You're fired."
"You said I'm not an employee."
"Then leave voluntarily."
Noah grinned and followed him inside.
A package sat just inside the bay door.